lackburn (I am not sure which), had forbidden his reading that same
evening, and had brought him to London.

"When I saw him he _appeared_ to be well. His mind was unclouded, his
pulse quiet. His heart was beating with some slight excess of the
natural impulse. He told me he had of late sometimes, but rarely, lost
or misused a word; that he forgot names, and numbers, but had always
done that; and he promised implicit obedience to our injunctions.

"We gave him the following certificate.

"'The undersigned certify that Mr. Charles Dickens has been seriously
unwell, through great exhaustion and fatigue of body and mind consequent
upon his public Readings and long and frequent railway journeys. In our
judgment Mr. Dickens will not be able with safety to himself to resume
his Readings for several months to come.

"'THOS. WATSON, M.D.
"'F. CARR BEARD.'

"However, after some weeks, he expressed a wish for my sanction to his
endeavours to redeem, in a careful and moderate way, some of the reading
engagements to which he had been pledged before those threatenings of
brain-mischief in the North of England.

"As he had continued uniformly to seem and to feel perfectly well, I did
not think myself warranted to refuse that sanction: and in writing to
enforce great caution in the trials, I expressed some apprehension that
he might fancy we had been too peremptory in our injunctions of mental
and bodily repose in April; and I quoted the following remark, which
occurs somewhere in one of Captain Cook's Voyages. 'Preventive measures
are always invidious, for when most successful, the necessity for them
is the least apparent.'

"I mention this to explain the letter which I send herewith,[284] and
which I must beg you to return to me, as a precious remembrance of the
writer with whom I had long enjoyed very friendly and much valued
relations.

"I scarcely need say that if what I have now written can, _in any way_,
be of use to you, it is entirely at your service and disposal--nor need
I say with how much interest I have read the first volume of your late
friend's Life. I cannot help regretting that a great pressure of
professional work at the time, prevented my making a fuller record of a
case so interesting."

The twelve readings to which Sir Thomas Watson consented, with the
condition that railway travel was not to accompany